Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

I have done the opposite: I'm reading much more than before. But instead of reading only one mainstream news outlet, I'm now subscribed to a variety of quality RSS feeds. These include news, blogs, Hacker News, startup stuff, financial. Across these I get around 400 headlines per day which I skim, and read about 5% of the most interesting. This gives me a great overview what is going on and I can go in depth on the interesting parts.

I'm using selfoss as feed reader. News sources I can recommend:

  - Financial Times (you can select the categories that interest you and build a feed from them)
  - Economist
  - Techcrunch
  - The Register
  German:
  - Faz
  - Handelsblatt

I recently subscribed to the weekend edition of the SZ. Print news still seems to have some sort of quality filters applied to it, and the choice of what is covered (or not covered) leaves me informed without becoming enraged.

Russian here, living in Russia. Yes, I have stopped reading all news completely -- even despite the fact that it may directly affect my survival (via mobilization).

I haven't been reading news since mid-August. I was in Georgia a that time, and I noticed just how much reading news (especially Russia-related news) made me sick. At the place I stayed at, there was another girl who was also feeling sick from reading news, so we decided to do a full detox -- no news, no politics in discussions.

So we unsubscribed from all political channels (our biggest news source was Telegram), and left all chats and groups where politics and news were being discussed.

I'm not looking back. I don't worry that I'll miss some major piece of news. I'll hear it here on HN anyway, or, if it's Russia-specific, I'll inevitably get it forwarded to me by friends who still read news. For example, here's how I learned that Mikhail Gorbachev has died: I read it here on HN, and a friend who was sitting next to me, read about it in a Telegram channel about high fashion.

So, I have no plans to get back to that dopamine hell. My life is too short for that.

Something I have taken to doing these days is playing some mindless but fun game while listening to long-form interviews or talks.

As a random example, these days I'm playing Slipways[1], but Diablo-style games or factory/builder games are also suitable.

Meanwhile I like to listen to fantastically insightful interviews with people like Julia Ioffe. You can watch a thousand 1-minute news clips and not gain as much understanding about Putin and the war in Ukraine as from a one-hour interview with her. Similarly, the Telegraph's "Ukraine the latest" is a roughly one-hour podcast I listen to every morning while taking the kid out for a walk. Perun's analysis of the logistics situation also tends to be spot on, and very insightful.

I used to listen to interesting characters on Joe Rogan, but Joe turned a bit... right wing nutjob. Lex Fridman is less crazy but also a less skilled interviewer. Still, he's got some stellar interviews like the one with Jim Killer[1]. Do you want to watch a soundbite from a politician in another country talking about something that will never affect you, or do you want to hear from the horse's mouth how your everyday life will change because of new technology?

I used to feel I didn't have time for this kind of thing, but overlapping it with gameplay makes it seem like zero time "spent" on it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4hL5Om4IJ4

As Mark Twain once said "If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed."

I guess it's up to the individual to choose what they prefer.